V
Finally, the fact which all must recognise in connection with Stevenson’s work is the versatility of talent which is displayed. From essays personal to essays critical; from short-stories picturesque to short-stories metaphysical, and stories of bogles to fairy stories of princes and magic bottles and wondrous enchanted isles; from tales of treasure to the politics of a principality, from Scottish history to tales of the South Seas; from travel-books to poems for men and children; from the thermal influences of forests to a defence of a Roman Catholic hero-priest; from Samoan politics to the story of the Justice Clerk; from plays to topographical history and imaginary war-news and the cutting of wood-blocks (to the satisfaction of Mr. Joseph Pennell)—that is a dazzling record. Quite obviously one cannot contemplate it without great admiration. When it is remembered also that it is the product of a man who was very frequently (though not, as is generally supposed, continuously) an invalid, the amount of it, and the variety, seems to be impossible. Yet it is possible, and this fact it is which finally explains our attitude to Stevenson. We think it marvellous that he should have been able to write at all, forgetting, as we do, that “writing his best was very life to him.” We do forget that; we ought not to forget it. We ought not to forget that Stevenson was a writer. He meant to be a writer, and a writer he became. He is known chiefly in these days as a writer; and in the future he will be still more clearly seen as a writer. The weaknesses of his work will be realised; to some extent his writing will fall in popular esteem; but he will be less the brave soul travelling hopefully and labouring to arrive, and more the deliberate writer. When other men sing and walk and talk and play chess and loiter, Stevenson wrote. In his life there is no question that he sang and walked and loitered and talked and played chess; but when he could do none of these things he could write. Writing was as the breath of his body; writing was his health, his friends, his romance. He will go down into literary history as the man who became a professional writer, who cared greatly about the form and forms of expression. The fact that he concentrated upon expression left his mind to some extent undeveloped, so that he could express very excellently perceptions more suitable to his youth than to his maturer years. It made his earlier writing too scented and velvet-coated. But it enabled him, when his feeling was aroused, as it only could have been in the last years of his life, to write at great speed, with great clearness, an account of the political troubles in Samoa and in particular of German diplomacy there, which seems to us still valuable—not because the facts it records are of extreme significance, but because at the end of his life Stevenson was at last to be found basing his work upon principles, really and consciously grasped, from which the incidental outcome was of less importance than the main realisation. Where he had hitherto been shuttlecocked by his impulses, and tethered by his moralism, he became capable of appreciating ideas as of more importance than their expression. If he had been less prolific, less versatile, less of a virtuoso, Stevenson might have been a greater man. He would have been less popular. He would have been less generally admired and loved. But with all his writing he took the road of least resistance, the road of limited horizons; because with all his desire for romance, his desire for the splendour of the great life of action, he was by physical delicacy made intellectually timid and spiritually cautious. He was obliged to take care of himself, to be home at night, to allow himself to be looked after. Was not that the greatest misfortune that could have befallen him? Is the work that is produced by nervous reaction from prudence ever likely to enjoy an air of real vitality? In the versatility of Stevenson we may observe his restlessness, the nervous fluttering of the mind which has no physical health to nourish it. In that, at least, and the charming and not at all objectionable inclination to pose. He was a poseur because if he had not pretended he would have died. It was absolutely essential to him that he should pose and that he should write, just as it was essential that he should be flattered and anxiously guarded from chill and harm. But it was necessary for the same reason, lest the feeble flame should perish and the eager flicker of nervous exuberance be extinguished. That Stevenson was deliberately brave in being cheerful and fanciful I do not for one moment believe; I think such a notion is the result of pure ignorance of nervous persons and their manifestations. But that Stevenson, beneath all his vanity, realised his own disabilities, seems to me to be certain and pathetic. That is what makes so much of the extravagant nonsense written and thought about Stevenson since his death as horrible to contemplate as would be any dance of ghouls. The authors of all this posthumous gloating over Stevenson’s illnesses have been concerned to make him a horribly piteous figure, to harrow us in order that we should pity. How much more is Stevenson to be pitied for his self-constituted apostles! We shall do ill to pity Stevenson, because pity is the obverse of envy, and is as much a vice. Let us rather praise Stevenson for his real determination and for that work of his which we can approve as well as love. To love uncritically is to love ill. To discriminate with mercy is very humbly to justify one’s privilege as a reader.
VI
It is sufficient here to maintain that Stevenson’s literary reputation, as distinct from the humanitarian aspect of his fortitude, is seriously impaired. It is no longer possible for a serious critic to place him among the great writers, because in no department of letters—excepting the boy’s book and the short story—has he written work of first-class importance. His plays, his poems, his essays, his romances—all are seen nowadays to be consumptive. What remains to us, apart from a fragment, a handful of tales, and two boy’s books (for Kidnapped, although finely romantic, was addressed to boys, and still appeals to the boy in us) is a series of fine scenes—what I have called “plums”—and the charm of Stevenson’s personality. Charm as an adjunct is very well; charm as an asset is of less significance. We find that Stevenson, reviving the never-very-prosperous romance of England, created a school which has brought romance to be the sweepings of an old costume-chest. I am afraid we must admit that Stevenson has become admittedly a writer of the second class, because his ideals have been superseded by other ideals and shown to be the ideals of a day, a season, and not the ideals of an age. In fact, we may even question whether his ideals were those of a day, whether they were not merely treated by everybody as so much pastime; whether the revival of the pernicious notion that literature is only a pastime is not due to his influence. We may question whether Stevenson did not make the novel a toy when George Eliot had finished making it a treatise. If that charge could be upheld, I am afraid we should have another deluge of critical articles upon Stevenson, written as blindly as the old deluge, but this time denouncing him as a positive hindrance in the way of the novel’s progress. However that may be, Stevenson seems very decidedly to have betrayed the romantics by inducing them to enter a cul-de-sac; for romantic literature in England at the present time seems to show no inner light, but only a suspicious phosphorescence. And that fact we may quite clearly trace back to Stevenson, who galvanised romance into life after Charles Reade had volubly betrayed it to the over-zealous compositor.
Stevenson, that is to say, was not an innovator. We can find his originals in Wilkie Collins, in Scott, in Mayne Reid, in Montaigne, Hazlitt, Defoe, Sterne, and in many others. No need for him to admit it: the fact is patent. “It is the grown people who make the nursery stories; all the children do, is jealously to preserve the text.” That is what Stevenson was doing; that is what Stevenson’s imitators have been doing ever since. And if romance rests upon no better base than this, if romance is to be conventional in a double sense, if it spring not from a personal vision of life, but is only a tedious virtuosity, a pretence, a conscious toy, romance as an art is dead. The art was jaded when Reade finished his vociferous carpet-beating; but it was not dead. And if it is dead, Stevenson killed it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
(The dates within brackets are those of composition or of first periodical publication.)
The Pentland Rising, 1866.
A New Form of Intermittent Light, 1871.
The Thermal Influence of Forests, 1873.